Con game: MMA fighters use a variety of tricks to gain fight-night confidence

In the fall of 2009, I was sitting in the kitchen of the small house Jon Jones and his girlfriend rented in Ithaca, N.Y., listening to him lay out a plan for all the spectacular violence he planned to visit upon Matt Hamill just a few months later.

Jones was only three fights into his UFC career at the time, and still less than two years into his MMA career as a whole, but even then the future champion was big on mental preparation, visualization, all that.

“I picture him getting in my face at the weigh-in,” Jones said. “I have images of Matt Hamill’s face, what it’s going to look like when he catches a kick to the side of his head, when I see his eyes roll back when I catch him with that hard punch. Mentally, I’ve already won the fight by the time I step in the cage.”

At the time, he explained all this with a boyish enthusiasm, but no particular malice. He might have been describing how he planned to beat the guy in a game of racquetball rather than how he was going to pummel him into unconsciousness on live TV. When I pointed out that what he was describing was bound to be a pretty terrible night in Hamill’s life – and that Hamill was probably sitting around in his own house right now, feeling just as certain that it was going to go the other way – Jones flashed a look of genuine surprise.

“I guess so,” he shrugged, as if he found the idea that Hamill might not know what he was in for to be vaguely sad, but nothing more. As if his own confidence sprang from facts, from proven ability, from hard work in the gym, while his opponent’s came from a misguided faith in himself that would soon be exposed.

And, of course, it was. That fight might still show up as a disqualification loss on Jones’ record, but it was Hamill who left that night bloody and beaten. As Hamill’s trainer Duff Holmes told me recently, “We never considered the Jones fight a win, and we were the first to come out and say so.” Regardless of what it looks like on paper, it was Jones’ vision for that night that proved more accurate than Hamill’s, and everyone knows it.

What I occasionally find myself wondering – not just about Jones and Hamill, but about any professional fighter in any fight – is how anyone could possibly be so confident in a sport in which, sometimes, you simply get outclassed. Sometimes the other guy is just better than you, and sometimes you have no way of knowing it until you’re in the cage with him, bleeding out of holes in your face that you definitely did not show up with. Once that happens to you, what are you supposed to tell yourself before your next fight? How are you supposed to go back to believing that hard work in the gym equals success, and that it’s the other guy’s vision for how the fight will go that is hopelessly wrong?

What it comes down to is a question that every fighter has to answer for himself: What makes you so sure that you’re going to win this thing? After all, at the highest level of the sport, everybody puts in the time in the gym. Everybody was a big shot somewhere else, whether it was college wrestling or kickboxing tournaments or just the regional MMA circuit that he dominated before getting a UFC contract. Everybody thinks he or she’s going to be a champion sooner or later, even if the vast majority of fighters will turn out to be wrong. How do you convince yourself that you’re in the elite minority?

“That’s a conversation I have with all my fighters,” said Duke Roufus, who trains fighters such as Anthony Pettis, Alan Belcher, and others at his Roufusport gym in Milwaukee. “At this level, everybody’s tough, everybody wants to be the best, everybody’s training hard. The next thing to ask yourself is, what do you bring to the table? You have to have something that they don’t have.”

That elusive and mysterious “something” is a trait that seems to vary with the fighter and the situation. Some will insist that they have an edge over a specific opponent in one particular area. Others say they’re better all around, or mentally tougher, or more experienced, or a harder worker. It’s always something, and that something seems like a necessary psychological crutch.

For a fighter like Joseph Benavidez, who’s just a few days away from his flyweight title fight with Demetrious Johnson at UFC 152, the something is actually everything.

“You can’t give him any kind of edge in your mind,” Benavidez said. “He didn’t work harder than you, he’s not better than you, and he doesn’t want this more than you. You’re going to get this belt for all of those reasons. That’s how I think. Every time I’m working, I tell myself that there’s no way he’s working harder than me. I’m doing everything it takes to be a champion and to beat this guy.”

According to Benavidez, natural talent and athletic ability don’t play much of a role in his thinking. Obviously, he admits, he’s got some baseline level of physical competence and necessary attributes thanks to the genetic lottery, but he insists he “wasn’t born super athletically gifted.” What he does have, he claims, is almost entirely a result of what he’s earned in the gym.

“That’s where the fight is won,” Benavidez said. “Of course everyone wants to go out there and win. But to prepare, to get up when you’re hurt and exhausted and go out there and do it when you’re by yourself, that’s the hard stuff. I get confidence from knowing I’ve done everything it takes to fulfill this dream.”

But it’s one thing to get your confidence from your work ethic when you already believe that you’re better than the other guy anyway. What about if you’re not? That’s the situation UFC middleweight Brian Stann said he faced when he first rose through the MMA ranks, and maybe one he still faces today. Admitting that he had “a limited skill set” back when he was the WEC champion, Stann said he sometimes still feels surprised to have made it this far in his fighting career, even if he knows how he managed to do it.

“I feel like I’m playing with the house’s money,” Stann said. “If you’d asked me a few years ago whether I’d still be doing this, in the UFC, for a living, I’d have said, boy, I sure would like to. And now here I am. It’s because of hard work and discipline. But if I’m not capable of competing with the best guys in the sport, then I need to get busy doing something else.”

At the same time, it’s hard not to wonder if there aren’t some obstacles that can never be overcome, no matter how much time you spend in the gym. If you’re lacking certain physical attributes, what happens when you come up against someone who has those natural abilities, and also possesses a work ethic to match yours?

According to Stann’s opponent at UFC 152, Michael Bisping, that’s exactly what’s about to happen on Saturday night. He doesn’t deny that Stann has made the most of what attributes he has, but he still expects “an easy time of it” in Toronto.

“He’s a strong-minded person, he works hard, and he’s a fighter through and through,” Bisping said of Stann. “That’s why he’s in the UFC and why he’s been successful. But when people exploit his weaknesses and don’t fight his fight, he doesn’t do too well. … I’m not going to make it a contest of who can punch the hardest. I’m going to use the sweet science. I can out-box him, out-wrestle him, and out-jiu-jitsu him. That’s why nine times out of 10 I win this fight. The freak occurrence is that he lands a big right hand that puts me down. Can that happen? Of course it can. But I really do not see that happening, and other than that, what can he do to me?”

If that sounds like confidence bordering on arrogance, maybe it is. But then, maybe that’s what you have to possess in order to get yourself into the cage on fight night. It’s just a question of where you get that confidence. For Stann, it might be mostly based on his work ethic. For Bisping, it’s “experience in fights, in gyms, in sparring.”

“A lot of it is natural talent,” Bisping said. “But it’s a combination of that and desire, how much you want it. This is what I do, what I pride myself on. This is who I am. I’ve always been a fighter. Ever since I was a kid getting in fights on the playground at 8 years old, I was always proud that I was the toughest kid in school. I don’t know why – because maybe I would have been better off if I was proud of good grades and getting straight As, but I wasn’t. I was proud of the fact that I was the toughest kid in school. Now the school is the UFC.”

And to hear coaches like Roufus tell it, it’s exactly that sort of attitude that a fighter has to have. It’s also something you can’t necessarily teach, he said. That’s why he likes working with wrestlers or other martial artists who grew up competing almost every weekend from the time they were children. The ones who are still at it as adults have typically learned how to approach this type of competition, though there are exceptions to the rule.

“Certain people surprise me,” Roufus said. “And I know guys who are great athletes, but they don’t show up on fight night. They’re Tarzan in the gym and Jane in the game. Some people that I take to fights, it’s the most natural thing in the world for them. But then one of the best athletes I’ve ever coached, he cries in the locker room before fights.”

Still, according to Roufus, that doesn’t mean there’s only way to be successful in MMA. In fact, that’s one of the things he loves about combat sports, that “there is no mold” for how to be a fighter. Some guys get by more on skill and athletic ability while others have better attitudes, stronger minds or superior work ethics.

“That’s why I love this sport so much,” Roufus said. “There is no one way to do it. Even a guy like B.J. Penn, you look at him and you’re not supposed to be real intimidated by a guy who looks like that. He’s not your physical specimen of an athlete. I mean, yeah, he’s gifted, but he’s not super strong, not incredibly fast or explosive, but he has that it factor and he knows how to get in there and win.”

And yet, even Penn has had his nights where he showed up bursting with confidence, absolutely certain that it was his opponent who was in for an unpleasant surprise. Even Penn has had to find out the hard way that he was wrong. Then he must have known what it was like to be on the other side for a change, to know that the first thing he’d have to do was find a way to convince himself that it would be different next time.

UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey is probably the greatest female fighter on the planet, which is a tremendous feat. So why are we seemingly so obsessed with arguing about whether she could beat up men?